In the field of practice of medicine, various kinds of medical information, such as text information in a chart or the like, are stored and accumulated as electronic data. The various kinds of medical information include images obtained by a modality, such as a CT, MRI, US, and PET, waveform information about an electrocardiogram, brain waves or the like, and various examination reports.
In recent years, some system was provided to make it possible to retrieve medical information stored in an individual server of each medical institution from other medical institutions through a service center. For example, the service center manages the location of medical information, such as a server of a specific medical institution storing information about a specific patient. Further, the service center manages link to patients' numbers (patients' ID's) of each medical institution, a right to access medical information, and the like. Further, a medical institution that provides information, such as a major hospital in an area, and institutions that retrieve information, such as a clinic, are connected to each other through a network, such as VPN and SSL, in which the security of communication is secured.
When each medical institution inputs a patient's ID of a patient about whom information is to be shared, medical information about the patient scattered in different medical institutions in the area is displayed as a list. Each medical institution can retrieve medical images by DICOM Viewer in addition to prescription data and examination data. Further, it is possible to share document files and the like. Information is accessible also from an information retrieval institution, such as a clinic.
As a method for easily selecting and checking a massive amount of medical information, as described above, various user interfaces have been proposed. For example, a region in a human body shape or an image representing a partial human body displayed on a display screen is selected by a pointing device. Then, medical images related to a diseased region in the selected region or in the vicinity of the selected region are extracted from a medical information database, and the extracted medical images are displayed as a list (for example, Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2003-260030 (Patent Document 1)).
Further, a method using an input device including a touch-panel-type display connected to a workstation for medical image processing is known. In the method, when a base line is generated in an axial slice image by a touch operation at the input device, a coronal image sliced at the generated base line is generated and displayed (for example, Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2009-119000 (Patent Document 2)).
Meanwhile, when a patient is treated, past diseases of the patient, and treatments performed for the diseases may greatly influence treatment that will be performed on the patient. Therefore, doctors want to refer to patient's medical information in the past in addition to information about a currently treated region.
However, the user interface disclosed in Patent Document 1, which tries to obtain more medical information, aims at obtaining information only about a region. Therefore, it is impossible to obtain information about a disease in a different region. Further, the user interface disclosed in Patent Document 2 is used to switch an image that has been selected to a different image. Therefore, it is impossible to check what kind of image is present besides the selected image.